Oftentimes, an Ayahuasca ceremony and all the mental husk it surfaces have the effect of a nuclear bomb on us. A lot of memories, trauma, and thoughts are suddenly within the reach of our conscious mind. It is as if our minds were disheveled, and we need to deal with it now.
A suitable analogy for it is rebuilding a house. If from the very beginning, a house was built with major flaws, it will create a lot of issues. We can run around patching the never-ending cracks, but soon the damage will manifest itself faster than we are able to fix it, and as a result, the building will collapse.
The only reliable solution here is to break down the whole building and start anew. In many ways, Ayahuasca is doing that. It deconstructs beliefs, memories, and trauma and rearranges the building blocks of our mind into a new and stable house.
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What is the integration of Ayahuasca?
Ayahuasca (at least partially) is about breaking the existing dysfunctional mental patterns so that your mind can develop new, more efficient ones.
So the process of dealing with our unsettled mind after the Ayahuasca experience is called âintegration.â
Integration is absolutely necessary, and the good news is that our mind has an embedded self-healing and self-organizing mechanism. When you disturb it, it tends to balance itself back into a stable and comfortable state.
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After attending an Ayahuasca retreat, your unconscious mind is giving you a variety of hints, insights, and intuitions about things that are really important to you. And this soup of unconsciousness needs to be rationalized and understood for you to be able to use it in a practical way. So integration is the act of converting everything you dug out of your mind into useful and actionable tips that you implement in your daily life.
It all boils down to practical things. Without them, the richness of the Ayahuasca will stay in the realm of theoretical philosophy. And if youâre serious about inviting changes into your life, then all theoretical insights should be transformed into small actions that, in the long run, will yield big results.
Why do we need it?
Your active participation in the integration of the Ayahuasca experience can give you a number of advantages.
First of all, you economize time. Instead of waiting weeks, months, and years for changes and conclusions to emerge, you can naturally speed up the process. It is like the healing of a wound after surgery. You can leave it to heal on its own, or you can direct your attention and care to it so that the healing can happen in the best possible way.
Moreover, active integration can broaden and deepen the insights received from Ayahuasca. Oftentimes, Ayahuasca can give you direction for your further exploration, and if approached wisely, you can dig out an incredible amount of facts about yourself while trying to make sense of the Ayahuasca experience you had.
In addition to that, integration of the Ayahuasca experience can teach you to take care of your mental health and react to any discomfort at early stages. This habit will allow you to avoid the necessity of repeating Ayahuasca in the future.
Keeping your house constantly clean will exclude the need for long, deep, and painful cleaning.
Things to avoid while integrating
There are things you would ideally avoid during your integration period after an Ayahuasca retreat.
First of all, avoid postponing your integration. There is definitely a fine balance between having total emotional and mental relaxation after the retreat and holding yourself in a state of exhaustion and stress for the sake of further mental healing.
Be wise and plan your period after the retreat. Give yourself several weeks but do not wait for months or even years before starting your integration. Memories tend to become dim, and it becomes harder and harder to translate them into conclusions you can act upon.
So even before the start of your retreat, think about what you will do after it and when you will do the necessary integration work that will help you change and practically improve your life.
One or two weeks after the retreat is usually enough for a reasonable rest before starting to allocate time and energy for integration. There is no one-size-fits-all with the time of rest, so if you feel in need of an extended rest - go for it, but just be honest and try not to disguise the desire to procrastinate under the necessity of having rest.
Now let's explore nine very powerful yet simple ways to absorb the unconscious building blocks into our rational mind.
1. Journaling
One of the most powerful integration methods you have access to, is journaling.
Journaling allows you to structure your thoughts in incredible ways. Instead of trying to keep all the small details in your memory and make conclusions on the run, you can write down ideas and insights to come to a deeper understanding of what happened during your Ayahuasca retreat.
Writing gives you extra support in rationalizing thoughts. You can come back and reread the written materials and rethink them. As a result, your written thoughts are much deeper.
2. Think-aloud
One more technique that I like is thinking aloud. It is something similar to journaling.
For many people, vocalizing thoughts and the whole process of reasoning can give them extra concentration. During this process, we involve more senses and therefore become more involved in it.
You can even make a role-playing game with yourself. Start asking questions and answer them. At first, it may look weird and you may feel awkward, but as you continue, it will feel more and more comfortable, and the answers will be more sincere. In the end, you will feel like you had a conversation with a lifelong friend.
Be as honest as possible while answering your own questions. You will be surprised to find out things you were not aware of.
These conversations will use a lot of mental bricks disturbed by Ayahuasca to build new understanding, new conclusions, and new actions to improve your life.
A delicate yet important remark - please make sure nobody hears you during this process; otherwise, people will think that instead of healing, Ayahuasca drove you nuts.
3. Long solo hikes
One more great way to rationalize the Ayahuasca experience is to have long solo hikes. During that time, the constant and steady walking creates around us a mental bubble that processes thoughts in a different way. This phenomenon can be more vividly observed while jogging.
While running at a steady pace, we literally shift into a different state of mind. I would say that jogging reduces the intensity of our thoughts. So we would want our minds to be quiet but not too much for the processing of the Ayahuasca experience to happen.
For this reason, long hikes are the best. On the one hand, you are not distracted by gadgets and people, and on the other hand, you are in a state of mind that frees you from the day-to-day rush. In this state, a lot of Ayahuasca-related insights can come to your attention, and you have the time and personal space to contemplate them.
4. Spending time in Nature
Nature is our greatest friend and the source of our health and well-being. Being in nature literally helps us to discharge unnecessary mental noise.
Being close to nature makes us less stressed, fearful, and anxious.
As a part of integration practice, you can spend as much time in nature as possible. Go and spend the night in the forest. Thousands of trees around you are living beings. They communicate with each other, they can feel you and your state of mind.
I know this sounds sentimental, but studies are proving that hugging trees has an impact on your hormonal system and therefore impacts your well-being.
So being close to big trees reduces your base stress level, making it easier to contemplate insights received from Ayahuasca.
Also, you can climb a mountain and spend some time there. In many ancient traditions, mountains are considered conscious living beings. Whether true or not, being in the mountains greatly tunes your mind into peaceful and quiet wavelengths. That is exactly what you need during the integration process and it would greatly help you make sense and extract valuable lessons from your Ayahuasca experience.
5. Travel
Traveling exposes you to new places, situations, environments, and life experiences.
The influx of this novelty can fuel your integration process and keep your mind in a flexible and adaptable state. Most of the integration happens in the background, and traveling facilitates this work a lot.
Instead of heading home right after your Ayahuasca retreat, consider having at least several days of extra travel. Giving yourself some extra time outside of your well-trodden path will serve you well.
In many ways, Ayahuasca is about finding new, cleaner, and more natural life paths, and traveling is also about that. It is not a coincidence that a psychedelic experience is called âa tripâ. It is a movement from your current state (point A) to your new state (point B), and everything that happens in between is what makes it priceless. In the same way, traveling is enriching and makes you face facts about life and your place in it.
6. Spending time with friends and close relatives
Especially for women, due to the way they unload the emotional charge, it is important to talk out the ups and downs of their Ayahuasca ceremony.
Having someone who can just listen and not try to âsolveâ your problem is huge.
Ayahuasca is very rich in the insights and hints it gives about oneself and as a woman, it is very beneficial to have someone she can entrust this knowledge to.
If you have a friend or a relative that you feel comfortable talking to, donât hesitate to open up.
If you donât have a person like that yet, you can reach out to a psychologist or another type of mental health professional.
The main point here is talking out your feelings, your thoughts, and your emotions. The more, the better.
While talking about it, our mind is bringing to rational light vague and obscure ideas and thoughts. That is exactly what you want during your Ayahuasca integration period.
7. Talking to elders
Depending on the worldview you have, there are different people you consider to be elders. In most spiritual traditions, a priest is an elder person who knows the practices of connecting with the Higher Force. In the modern materialistic world, that role is held by mental health professionals.
Regardless of the framework you view life through, to succeed with integration, you need someone whom you look up to and trust. This person can listen carefully to all the findings you brought from Ayahuasca and give you suggestions about what to do with that knowledge.
If you are a man, and you have a wise father, uncle, or someone with plenty of life experience, talk to him. These people donât even need to know that the stuff you are discussing with them is from the Ayahuasca.
Casually start a subject and let them listen and maybe they will have some good ideas that you can borrow.
As a woman, if you have a granny, aunt, or the old lady you oftentimes encounter on your way home, try and establish a relationship with these women because the amount of love and wisdom they can give is hard to overestimate.
Nowadays there is a tragical lack of wise old people we can follow.
Among young people, there is a lot of arrogance and neglect when it comes to the insights we can get from elders. And that is a pity.
The fact that someone lived twice as long as we did means that he or she has made twice as many mistakes and learned twice the lessons. So why not try to borrow that knowledge and avoid making our own mistakes?
If you donât have a person like that, make it your goal to find one. Having a personal touch with someone older than you is rewarding beyond belief.
8. Talking to the Shaman
There are few people who understand the world of Ayahuasca as a shaman does.
To be a shaman means to have a PhD degree in practical, traditional, psychedelic healing. And the amount of knowledge and experience is the perfect tool that can help others to integrate and make sense of their experience.
In a good Ayahuasca retreat, the day after the ceremony is followed by a conversation with the shaman. The format of these discussions can vary. It could be a âsharing circleâ or a 1-on-1 discussion (if the groups in the retreat are small) but regardless of the way it is done, talking to the shaman can be as impactful as the Ayahuasca ceremony itself.
During the interview, you can share with the shaman everything that happened to you on Ayahuasca. Open up as much as you would be able and share the visions, sensations, memories, and everything else that you remember. Your own interpretation of it is also important as it will give the shaman a better understanding of your thought process.
After having this input information, the shaman, through the prism of his experience, will give you important hints about what the experience means and how to understand it. It is trying to figure out the image while connecting the dots and struggling because of some crucial dots that are missing.
The shaman is oftentimes supplying you with the crucial pieces of the puzzle and you end up with a lot of âa-haâ moments.
9. Spiritual practice
In the context of the integration of the Ayahuasca experience, the spiritual practice is both the ultimate method and the end goal.
Ayahuasca is teaching many things and there is an incredible number of levels to its depth. One of the most transformational ideas it opens us to is that there is something Bigger than what we are told. And we are designed to have access to it.
The spiritual practices of all times were meant to help us establish this connection and develop it.
If you really want to make use of Ayahuasca and its effects, be open to following a spiritual practice of your choice. There is no advice here; we are all different, and the most suitable practice will find you once you are ready.
Meditation, yoga, prayers, chanting, etc. - these are proven methods to keep our minds integrated all the time. Having a routine of that type will simply allow your mind to be constantly in good shape.
How to know when you are done integrating?
As you see, there are many methods that you can use to integrate your Ayahuasca experience. And since there is a lot you can do, it begs the question of when to stop and how to know that you are done integrating.
The answer lies in the integration as a term. By âintegrationâ we mean the process of helping our mind to rebuild itself. And how to know that your house is ready? It is comfortable to live in it.
So when you feel safe and at peace, when there is no excessive emotional charge, when you feel joyful and peaceful, it means that it worked.
There is an infinite number of symptoms, but you will know that the dust settled after having a clear vision of your life around you.
What comes after integration?
After the integration, comes the maintenance of the result. There is no steady state for anything in this world. You either progress or you degrade. This is especially true for our minds.
If not taken care of, it is gradually moving towards the need for another Ayahuasca retreat.
So take action - fix your daily schedule, your diet, your exercises, and your routines. Find like-minded people and build relationships with them. Find your Spiritual Practices and live your life.
Your Ayahuasca retreat is finished when you bring to the surface of your conscious mind all the insights you received. When it is done, you will have practical steps and actions that can improve your daily life. At that stage, your main job will be to implement the lessons you learned.
Be sure that there are actions that can help you get there faster and the more of those actions you do, the faster your progress and more powerful the overall effect of Ayahuasca will be.
P.S. If you enjoyed the ideas expressed in this blog, please check our retreats where we implement in practice all the advice we mentioned above.
For more information, feel free to contact us!
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